by Lydia Millet
Guy was not gay, of course. But he had an edge of anger to him. The ones that weren’t gay were often angry about it.
It was a trade-off, more or less.
OK. The bird was finally chilling out. Lying there. Effin’ dead.
“Oi. Bag one, then?”
She jumped. He’d snuck up right behind her. It was the red-faced “bloke” from “down the pub,” Guy’s new pet “lager lout.” (Self! Excellent!) Pig, as far as she knew. Gave her the creeps. What Guy saw in these losers from the King John with their saggy beer tits … Come to think of it, she liked this one even less when he was carrying a gun. A gun was like a cigarette that way: If you already looked good, it made you look better; if you looked crap to begin with, it made you look even worse. This particular “lager boy” had a chip on his shoulder about women with power. It hung on him like a stink. Made him actually dangerous.
Best not to challenge him. Alone here in the middle of the woods.
“I guess, you know—actually, I feel pretty bad. You know? I mean, it was really suffering.”
“Brain the size of a peanut, yeah? How much suffering could there be?”
He was openly contemptuous. Thing about these lager boys of Guy’s was, they gave her a reality check. Like, what would it be like to be a regular person again? They had zero respect for her, for her megastar stature. At this point in her career, most people she met either had to resist an urge to genuflect or got completely tongue-tied. Often their mouths hung open like Down syndrome kids’. (Which was sad. The real retards, that is. Come to think of it, retards were among the few who still acted normal.) Once she had cheek-kissed a journalist—one, two, in the English manner—and he’d fainted and soiled himself all over the place. And that was a guy who was used to famous people; they were his total job. You learned to spot in a second which ones were going to freak out. Point was, the lager louts would have been refreshing if they weren’t such assholes. She was sorry for their wives and girlfriends.
He leaned down to pick it up.
“No! No,” she said, and put out her hand. “Just—thanks, but you can leave it. I want to just leave it there.”
“Defeats the purpose, dunnit.”
“I just want to leave it in peace. I don’t want to desecrate the corpse.”
He snorted.
“You seen the others? Guy? Was he with you?”
“Nah. Went off on me own.” He was turning away.
“Wait! Can you tell me something?”
“Mmm?”
“Is it a hen? Or—”
“Rooster! Blimey.”
What a relief. No eggs.
He stumped back down the hill, head shaking. Good riddance. She knelt down beside the small body, modest hump of brown and red feathers. It was still beautiful. She put her hand on the feathers. You could feel the slight warm frame beneath them. It was light, almost nothing in there. Birds were like air.
It had been more beautiful when it wasn’t dead, though. Before it was shot. Which wasn’t true of everyone. Take JFK, even John Lennon. Assassination had matured them like a fine pinot. If you died of old age, besides not leaving a good-looking corpse, all you died for in the end was living. But if you got shot, you were an instant symbol. You must have died for something.
She was always completely new; that was her secret, albeit an open one. Sure, it was obvious, but no one did it like she did. None of them could touch her when it came to transformation. That was the secret to her longevity. She wasn’t one megastar; she was a new one constantly. Novelty was what people lived for. Skin-deep, maybe, but so what? Skin was the biggest organ.
She should envy the bird, actually. Guy said in the wild they died of starvation. Shooting them was a mercy killing. I mean come on—fly, eat worms, fly, lay eggs, fly, starve to death. “Bob’s your uncle.” (You go girl.) Life was not equal for everyone. That was another reason she liked it better in England. They didn’t stand for that Thomas Paine bullshit here, all men were created equal, etc. What a crock. One drive through Alabama was all you needed to take the bloom off that rose. One ride on the subway. (Self: “Tube.” Easy.) Back home, the second you stepped out of a major city you were surrounded by the remnants of Early Man. Here there were some of those, too, but you had to go down the pub to find them. And at least they didn’t run the country.
All history was the history of class struggle, right? Lenin said that, and he had style. He had a very sharp look. Good tailoring. When the statues came down, she for one was sorry. She always wanted to meet him.
Maybe if she said a prayer. Yes. It felt right.
She touched the red string and squatted beside the bird. She would think holy thoughts about it; she would utter a name of God. She closed her eyes with her fingers resting on the feathers.
This was a problem she had: When she wasn’t already tired, it was sometimes hard to speed-meditate. Mind kept working, working. A powerful machine. Difficult to rein in. The bird once ate the worms, now worms would eat the bird … every word filled with light. That was how it should be. Desire to Receive. Which name? The name to reduce negativity?
What would help her and Guy, she saw, besides going to the Centre together on a more regular basis, was if Guy understood her more on a spiritual level. If he could just see her interior the way she saw it herself, he would not worry about the shrinking mini-Bings. He would see she was a little girl, secretly. She was a Shirley Temple. She was very pure, despite her sophistication. She believed in the ten luminous emanations. The ladder of awareness. She cherished in the core of herself the beingness of being.
Immortality for the bird, for all things of beauty. That was what the lager louts could just never capiche . It was right, so right, to know your own beauty and see it was God’s own beauty too. One day the body would be a giving vessel, not just a receiving. Life could go on forever. They might not be able to understand, the lager louts, what she was, what all of them could be if they gave themselves over to the light instead of, say, the Guinness, but that did not mean there was not room in God for them too. The house of God had many rooms. And through the great windows of these rooms, the golden beams of the divine streamed in.
Not as many rooms as Ashcombe, possibly. Joke! Joke to self. The house of God was never-ending.
The word for healing … ?
But you couldn’t heal dead.
She rose, still looking down at the bird. It was peaceful at last. She had killed it, but she was also sorry. In the end, that was all that mattered. Do not have violence in your heart.
“I love you now,” she said.
She heard voices and turned. The hunting party stood at the edge of the trees, too far away to distinguish. But she thought she saw Guy with them. Nearby stood the dogs, their tails wagging. The men’s faces were small white blurs. She saw hands raise. First she thought they were raised in greeting, hailing her from afar. She raised her own right arm and waved back. But then she caught flashes of silver in the sun. Flasks raised to their faces. One of them stepped back from the group, staggering and falling. They had apparently not ceased to drink the whole time. Their laughter was carrying.
She felt annoyed, but then a surge of forgiving. She could not blame them for their alcoholism. They were so small! All of them. Pity warmed her, a generous blossoming. It was so hard to be small.
Girl and Giraffe
THE MAN CALLED GEORGE Adamson lived a long life, long and rough and most of it in the African bush. He set up house in a tent with a thatch roof and dirt floor, full of liquor and books. He smoked a pipe with a long stem, sported a white goatee and went around bare-chested in khaki shorts—a small, fit man, deeply tanned. He was murdered in his eighty-third year by Somali lion poachers.
Joy Adamson, his wife and the author of Born Free, had been stabbed to death a few years before. She bled out alone, on the road where she fell. They were somewhat estranged by the time of Joy’s death. They had cats instead of children—George had raised scores of lions, while Jo
y had moved on from lions to cheetahs to leopards—and lions and leopards could not cohabit, so George and Joy lived apart. They maintained contact, but they were hundreds of miles distant.
Two of George’s adoptive children, Girl and Boy, had come to live with him in the early nineteen-sixties. This was in Kenya, where the Second Battalion of the Scots Guards was stationed to fight a mutiny in Dares-Salaam. It was the tail end of the British empire in East Africa.
When Girl and Boy were nine months old, the Scots Guards brought them to the plains beneath Mount Kenya, to a farm where a British company was filming Born Free. Along with twenty-two other lions, Girl and Boy had roles in the movie. Afterward most of the lions were sent to zoos, where they would live out their lives in narrow spaces. But Girl and Boy were given to Adamson, who had become attached to them during filming. He took them to a place named Meru, where he made a camp.
Meru was in red-earth country, with reticulated giraffes browsing among the acacia and thornbush. Zebras roamed in families and the odd solitary rhino passed through the brush; there were ostriches, too, and an aging elephant named Rudkin, who plundered tomatoes.
Girl was one of Adamson’s success stories whereas her brother, Boy, was an extravagant failure; yet Boy was the one that Adamson deeply loved.
Girl had been fed all her life, but she took readily to the hunt. Her first kill was a jeering baboon, her second an eland with a broken leg, her third a baby zebra. From there she took down a full-grown cow eland and was soon accomplished. Meanwhile Boy did not feel moved to kill for himself; he merely feasted off the animals she brought down.
So Girl became a wild lion, but Boy did not. Boy remained close to Adamson all his life, often in camp, between two worlds. Though he made forays into the wild, he did not vanish within it. And on one occasion, hanging around camp while people were visiting, he stuck his head into a jeep and bit the arm of a seven-year-old boy. This boy was the son of the local park warden; soon an order came down for Boy’s execution.
But before Adamson could carry out the shooting—he was busy protesting to bureaucrats, who declined to listen—Boy was found under a bush with a porcupine quill through one eye and a broken leg. If not euthanized on the spot he would have to be moved; so Adamson sat on the ground beside him until the veterinarian could fly in, by turns drinking whiskey, brandishing his rifle and sleeping.
After triage in camp Adamson prepared for an airlift to a better-equipped facility. He and Boy would live on a private estate of Joy’s while he nursed the animal back to health. And as they were loading the lion into Adamson’s pickup for the airstrip, Girl—though she had barely seen her brother for a year—emerged suddenly from the bush. She jumped onto the back of the truck, where Boy lay sedated and wrapped in a blanket. No one was able to entice her away, so they began the drive to the airstrip with Girl along for the ride.
But on the way she spotted a young giraffe by the road and became distracted. She jumped off the pickup. She was a wild lion now, and wild lions are hungry.
That was the last time Adamson saw Girl and the last time she saw any of them. Later, when Adamson returned to Meru, he would search for her fruitlessly.
Boy grew irritable in temperament after the surgery, due to the steel rod in his leg: And who among us might not become cantankerous? Two years after he and Girl were parted, he suddenly attacked a man named Stanley who had tended him with gentle care through illness and injury. Adamson heard a scream and went running with his rifle to find that Boy had bitten deep into Stanley’s shoulder; he turned and shot his beloved lion through the heart and then tended to his friend, who bled to death from a severed jugular inside ten minutes.
In Adamson’s autobiography the end of Boy is well described, while the end of Girl, who lived out her days in the wild, is invisible. Happy endings often are.
But there is one more report of Girl outside Adamson’s published writings. It was made by a man who claimed to have visited Adamson in his camp the year before his murder, one Stefan Juncker based in Tübingen, Germany. Juncker said he had made a pilgrimage to see Adamson at Kora, where he was living with his final lions. Since Adamson constantly welcomed guests to his camp, such a visit would not have been uncommon.
The two men sat beside a fire one night and Adamson—in his cups, which the German implied was not rare—became melancholy. He remembered a time when he had not been alone, before his wife and his brother had died. He remembered his old companions, sitting there at the base of the hills among the boulders and the thornbush; he remembered all his lions, his women and his men.
His brother Terence, who had lived with him at Kora, had in his dotage discovered that he had what Adamson called “a talent for divining.” By wielding a swinging pendulum over a map, he could determine the location of lost or wanted things. This included water, missing persons and lions, which he correctly located about 60 percent of the time. Adamson was skeptical in theory, not being much given to magical thinking, but had to admit that his brother’s method led him to his lions faster than spoor-or radio-based tracking. It was inexplicable, he said, but there it was.
Since Terence had died of an embolism two years before, Adamson no longer had a diviner.
At this point Adamson gestured toward a flower bush a few feet away. That was where Terence lay now, he said. And there, he said, turning, over there by a tree was dear Boy’s grave; he had buried his favorite lion himself, though others had dug up the corpse later to see proof that he was dead. He had been forced to rebury him several times.
The German was disturbed. He did not like the fact that Adamson had laid his brother to rest a stone’s throw from a killer.
There was much that science had not yet understood, went on Adamson, about the minds of lions and men and how they might meet. Divining was one example—had the lions somehow told Terence where they could be found?—but he had also known others. In fact, he said, he would tell of an odd event he had once witnessed. Over the years he had thought of it now and then, he said; and at this point a warm, low wind sprang up from the Tana River and blew out the embers of their campfire, sinking them into darkness.
He had thought of it over the years, he repeated, but he had mentioned it to no one. He would tell it, if the German could keep a secret.
Of course, lied the German.
It was when he was first taking Girl out to hunt. This was in Meru, he said, in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Of course now, more than twenty years later, Girl would have to be long dead.
All your stories end with someone dead, said the German.
All my stories? asked Adamson.
He and Girl had been walking through the forest together and had emerged into a clearing, where they surprised a herd of giraffes browsing. The herd quickly took off, galloping away before Adamson had a chance to count them, but they left behind a gangly foal without the sense to run. Perfect prey. It should fall easily. It stood stupidly, blinking, backed up against a large tree.
Girl charged, with Adamson standing by proudly. She had made several kills in the preceding days and he considered her a prodigy.
But abruptly she stopped, pulling up short. Her ears were flat; then they pricked. She and the foal seemed to be studying each other. Adamson was shocked, bordering on indignant, but he remained in the copse. Possibly Girl sensed something wrong with the giraffe, he thought; or possibly there were other predators behind it, competition in the form of a clan of hyenas he could not see.
As he waited Girl stood unmoving, crouched a few feet from her quarry. Then the giraffe reached up slowly and mouthed a branch with its mobile, rubbery lips. It chewed.
Adamson was flabbergasted. Possibly the animal recognized his lion as a neophyte hunter: But how could it? Giraffes were not insightful; they had the dullness of most placid grazers. Either way, the animal should be bolting. Girl would be on him in a second, fast as light.
He could see Girl only from the rear; her tail twitched, her shoulders hunched. He could not see her fac
e, which frustrated him, he told the German, for a lion’s face is extraordinary in its capacity for expression. What was she waiting for?
Then again, he thought, as he watched the stillness between them and held his own breath, the foal was going nowhere. Maybe Girl was hypnotized by the future: Maybe she saw the arc of her own leap, was already feeling the exhilaration of flight and the impact, the smell and weight of the foal as it crumpled beneath her, as she dragged and wrestled and tore it down, worried the tough hide and sweet flesh. Possibly she was waiting, pent up and ready.
But no. Girl straightened; she relaxed. She sniffed around the foal’s long legs. She jumped onto a dry log. She yawned.
And the giraffe kept eating, munching and grunting softly. It shifted on its feet; it stooped down, head dipping toward Girl and up again to the branches, where it tore and chewed, tore and chewed, with a complacent singularity of purpose.
There was sun on the log, glancing across the nape of the lion’s neck so that her face was illuminated, the rest of her in shadow. She licked a paw and lay down.
Adamson, squatting in the bushes, stayed put. His body was still but his mind worked hard, puzzling. He considered giraffes. Terence had a weakness for elephants; himself, he was strictly a lion man. But giraffes, though morphological freaks, had never interested either of them. Artiodactyla, for one thing: the order of camel, swine and bovids. Not suited for long-term relationships. Strictly for riding, eating or milking, really. He pitied them, but not much. There were no refrigerators in nature, after all; meat and milk had to keep themselves fresh.
